mr. calvin's last letter to earline

Stephanie Barber

earline,

earline, earline, i have told you too many times of the pain on my heart caused mostly by the lack of your love and consideration. earline i have grown tired and i walk on my all fours like a dog and ride your countless kin around this city hoping to catch a whiff of you in their saggy drawers and pockets. earline there is a gleam of beauty that is the sheen of your forehead and wide cheeks but it is also the sin i see surfacing on your skin. earline i have breathed random like red clover or white clover which pushes nitrogen deep into weak willed, wayward soil. it is like everything else on this planet a goddamned miracle. earline i am grown tired of being torn up this way--like a glacier here drifting alone with jagged complicated edges and deep icy fathoms. i think collisional boundaries and i think you are too big to turn from me. you are with your hands and somehow voice and tired or nervous. earline don't think that bouncing light makes you blind for eternity. they turn the chinese blind into masseuses--though they don't call them that over there--but you've got those strange small hands like to be almost useless. earline how i love your useless hands and wish they could remember my number. or where my house is at or the name of the movie we saw at the drive up 7 summers ago with your grandfather in his great blue impala asking all the time for clarification. "clarification earline" he'd say over and over again "clarification".

mr. calvin

Stephanie Barber lives in Baltimore, MD where she writes, makes films, creates performances, music and snakes. Her book poems was published in 2006 by Bronze Skull Press and her recent book these here separated to see how they standing alone or the soundtrack to six films by stephanie barber was published in May 2008 by Publishing Genius Press. Included in this book is her experimental essay the inversion, transcription, evening track and attractor (the soundtrack for the video of the same name) which was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has had numerous solo screenings of her film and video work including shows at MoMA, NY, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, Chicago Filmmakers and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Her performances have been featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Museum of Art, The Haggerty Museum of Art and galleries and artspaces around the world.